What do you think?
Rate this book
Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics
This textbook takes an innovative approach to the teaching of classical mechanics, emphasizing the development of general but practical intellectual tools to support the analysis of nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. The development is organized around a progressively more sophisticated analysis of particular natural systems and weaves examples throughout the presentation. Explorations of phenomena such as transitions to chaos, nonlinear resonances, and resonance overlap to help the student to develop appropriate analytic tools for understanding. Computational algorithms communicate methods used in the analysis of dynamical phenomena. Expressing the methods of mechanics in a computer language forces them to be unambiguous and computationally effective. Once formalized as a procedure, a mathematical idea also becomes a tool that can be used directly to compute results.The student actively explores the motion of systems through computer simulation and experiment. This active exploration is extended to the mathematics. The requirement that the computer be able to interpret any expression provides strict and immediate feedback as to whether an expression is correctly formulated. The interaction with the computer uncovers and corrects many deficiencies in understanding.
534 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2001
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 20, 2016
I'm only halfway through the first chapter, but so far the text is among the clearest of any technical text that I've come across in my life. The authors correctly note that advanced technical texts have a problem with parsimonious notation - specifically, formulas are either so short that they imprecisely represent what's going on, or they're so long that it's difficult to make heads or tails of the formula from first glance. The text appropriately repeats formulas to aid learning and carefully footnotes any possible pain points readers might face. Lovely.
And for the folks complaining about installing scheme and scmutils - download VMWare or virtualbox, install Ubuntu as a VM, and follow the page of instructions to install scmutils. Yes, it's annoying to have to sudo to do stuff, but this is also not the problem that it was when the book first came out since you can easily live with your current OS and urn this stuff.
And for the folks complaining about installing scheme and scmutils - download VMWare or virtualbox, install Ubuntu as a VM, and follow the page of instructions to install scmutils. Yes, it's annoying to have to sudo to do stuff, but this is also not the problem that it was when the book first came out since you can easily live with your current OS and urn this stuff.
March 21, 2009
Began this book but couldn't find a distribution of Scheme and Scmutils that ran well on a Windows machine. Tried using Mathematica but porting all that code was interfering with my learning of the physics. Its a damn shame that Sussman and Wise are so biased against Windows machines because this book and its approach looked to be great but they've sabotaged any hope of widespread availability by adamantly denying any support for the Windows community.
January 19, 2024
I wish universities would use this textbook for Classical Mechanics ;(
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews